In winter, I'm a Buddhist,
And in summer, I'm a nudist.
- Joe Gould
"My Religion"

In fact the whole of Japan is a pure invention. There is no such country, there are no such people.
- Oscar Wilde, aware in 1889 that popular conceptions about the country and its people are mostly fiction.

Not even 10% of what Japanese people are thinking is communicated overseas.
- Watanabe Tsuneo of CSIS

All foreign correspondents, whenever they desert statistics for judgments of opinion...become models of self-deception. They may call themselves, with proper gravity, ‘reporters’. But...they are nothing but quack psychiatrists who do not even know that this is the field they practise.
- Alistair Cooke

Where all news comes at second-hand, where all the testimony is uncertain, men cease to respond to truths, and respond simply to opinions. The environment in which they act is not the realities themselves, but the pseudo-environment of reports, rumors, and guesses.
- Walter Lippmann

We want...a revolution - a turning of the wheel, so that the state becomes once again the servant of the people, and not the other way around. We are the progressives now, comrades, (and) you the reactionaries.
- Daniel Hannan

If the textbook says, "It is well known that...", you can be sure that is a very good place to begin a research inquiry.
- Isaiah Bowman, geographer and former president of Johns Hopkins University

The budget should be balanced, the Treasury should be refilled, public debt should be reduced, the arrogance of officialdom should be tempered and controlled, and the assistance to foreign lands should be curtailed lest Rome become bankrupt. People must again learn to work, instead of living on public assistance.
- Cicero (55 BC)

We do not need a censorship of the press. We have a censorship by the press. It is not we who silence the press. It is the press that silences us. It is not a case of the Commonwealth settling how much the editors shall say; it is a case of the editors settling how much the Commonwealth shall know. If we attack the press, we shall be rebelling, not repressing.
- G.K. Chesterton

Koizumi sighting

AT A Tokyo symposium sponsored by the Japanese Association of Corporate Directors on 5 September, former Prime Minister Koizumi Jun’ichiro gave us a taste of what we’ve been missing since he stepped down from office — an insightful politician able to use his mother wit to clearly and convincingly explain the reasons for his positions. Nowhere was heard (or at least quoted) an unsupported platitude. It was his first address with the news media present since July 2010. Here’s a sample.

On the Democratic Party:

The fiscal difficulties mean that governments of the ruling party will continue to find it hard going. The change in government was a good thing, because the DPJ diet members have finally done us the favor of understanding just how difficult it is to be the ruling party.

On DPJ domestic policies:

Though (we) created a system for privatization that required absolutely no tax funds, the Democratic Party has eliminated expressway tolls. How do they expect to repay the debts of the Japan Public Highway Corporation? Theirs is a system that places a tax burden on people who do not use automobiles.

On their pledges:

The DPJ said that it could easily find JPY 16 trillion in funding sources if they formed a government. I’d like to see them do it without backtracking on that promise.

And on their foreign policy, specifically the “equilateral triangle” policy:

China is the more important country to us economically, but no policy of any kind will make headway unless mutual safety has been secured. After (its effort and sacrifice in) the Pacific War, the United States returned all the territory it occupied. China claims Okinawa and the Senkakus as its own territory. I do not accept the argument that we should have the same relationship with both.

His argument about highway tolls is noteworthy in particular because it highlights one the semi-libertarian ideas that were applied in Japan until not so long ago. Mr. Koizumi did not mention that only about 10% of registered vehicles in Japan use expressways, but Tokyo Metro Vice-Governor Inose Naoki — who’s been a published non-fiction writer for more than 30 years — has made that point.

High school tuition was another example. Under Japanese law, obligatory education ends at age 15, or the age at which a student leaves junior high school/middle school. That was the basis for requiring tuition to attend high school. (There’s a lot of common sense underlying that policy. No one’s making you go.) Government subsidies began during the LDP years, but the DPJ made high school free for all.

Also, one of Japan’s old-age pension systems requires monthly payments for a minimum of 25 years. It is the responsibility of the individual to make his own arrangement for payments. (I’ve got three years of payments remaining.) Failure to do so means you don’t qualify for the pension. The DPJ wants to scrap this requirement and apply consumption tax receipts for this purpose instead.

If you can’t “make his own arrangement for payments” because you are frequently unemployed or your job is not enough to feed and house you properly, then you have perhaps years of payments with no payout coming in return at the end. In the current system some of the poorest that never manage to amass a full 25 years of payments subsidize those who can. The system needs to change so that you get a pension payout at least proportional to the number of years you put in.

High school – it only makes sense to have people pay for it if you think high school graduates is a luxury today’s society can do without. If you think it’s a problem that Japan has too many overqualified high-schoolers then it’s fine.

In both cases it’s not just about the individual benefit but of the societal one. Does the Japanese economy need a well-educated workforce? Should people Do Japan want or need a society where senior citizens end up under blue tarps because they never managed to get a salaried job or a white-collar position? The external effects are much too large in both cases for it to be only about individual economy and individual choice.

Removing the highway toll was daft, fully agree on that.
———–
J: Thanks for the note. Three points.

1. The pension system that I’m referring to is not the only one.

Also, in regard to your reference to people who are unemployed or underemployed, I’ve never understood the logic of organizing systems in which 95%, or to stretch it, 90% of the population are penalized for the other 5%, or at most, 10%.

2. White collar employment is not the only option. There are some people who are not interested in that work, nor are they interested in the sort of things one studies in a Japanese high school. A high school education is not necessary to install or maintain climate control systems, for example. Companies put those employees through a training program. There’s no reason why it can’t start at age 15 through an apprentice program, and I know Japanese who agree.

3. I can only compare the Japanese educational system with that in America, and the Japanese system is far superior. They print sample test questions in the newspapers for high school students here. Most American high school students would fail those tests. Badly.

One school in my town hands out material to its sixth graders presenting problems from an American ninth-grade textbook. They’re astonished to see things they’ve already mastered. Post-graduate work is the only reason most Japanese would have for going to an American university.